Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“You shouldn’t have done that, Iris.”

I attempted to hide my staring eyes with my arm.

There was a muttering and a whispering. I stuck out my free arm and blundered forward.

“Miss Pratt?”

“No more questions,” I said. But I wasn’t getting anywhere. I smacked into a wall, dislodging a picture.

“Please,” said Mr. Umlah.

“Can’t you see I want to get out of here!”

They made way, they cleared a path for me. The floor was at once echoic. But this was worse: the room tilted oddly. I inched forward foolishly in blackness, using my hands like a swimmer. I should never have come, I thought. Why had I? There I was, in the middle of this crowd, a jackass, exposed. There was a hush in the room.

No , someone said.

“I’ll be all right in a minute,” I said. “I just need some elbow room.”

Oh, God .

“Let me give you a hand,” said Mr. Umlah.

Do something .

“Go away,” I said. But I was off balance and started to teeter. The deck bucked and nearly toppled me. I heard surf, a heavy sea — this was a gale. I struggled on.

Very distinctly, one of the fretting voices — but this was both a whisper and a shout — said, She’s blind!

It is a terrible word. It stopped me in my tracks. They were bellowing at me. Most people think that if you’re blind you’re deaf as well (and kind and forgiving and charitable and not interested in money). They screeched and rushed forward to help me, and of course, being gallery buffs, they all had cameras. I heard film being wound, dust caps removed, the ratchetings of lenses being focused.

“No pictures!” I said. “Put those things down!”

And they obeyed, they gave me room. But I’d had enough. The sob started in my chest; I fought it, and then let go, and in front of all those people I turned on the waterworks.

PHOEBE said, “It’s another cable.”

“Don’t!” I blocked my ears. I’d had just about enough of apologies and people weeping over me. The pity was much worse than the praise. It was hard being famous; it was unbearable being a freak. My photographs, which I had found in a mood of adventure and exuberance — the greatest joy I had ever known — were prophetic in a grotesquely wounding way: I was now like one of the wilder-looking members of Millsaps Circus, being celebrated for my deformity.

It was no use explaining that I had been fine when I’d taken the pictures in Florida. I was assumed to be a champion of the afflicted. No one knew the true source of my special sort of blindness, and I wouldn’t quote anyone my favorite line from Orlando’s poetry book: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.” (“He was a Harvard man,” said Orlando when, to educate me, he read these poems.) For the camera crowd I had become my own pictures. Americans adore a handicap in a celebrity. I had been revealed as The Blind Photographer of the Cape. The attention exhausted me. It was the tyranny of admiration. So I had fled and I wanted nothing more than to curl up and make myself as small as a comma or the tadpole it resembled and just wriggle away.

“Listen,” said Phoebe, and even with my fingers stuck in my ears I heard her. “It’s from Papa. They’re on their way home, they’re—” She stopped and took a deep breath.

“What’s wrong?” I looked closely at her. She was squinting hard at the cable, her face twitching in hesitation, her eyes darting as she reread the message.

“Nothing.”

“Read it.”

Her voice went flat as she read, “ Leaving today .”

“There’s more.”

“No.”

Tumblers gulped in her little locked heart as they fell into place.

“Read the rest of it, Phoebe.”

“How do you know so darned much!” she said, and went on reading in a dull defeated voice, “ Leaving today, thanks to you. Papa .”

“‘Thanks to you,’” I repeated. “Does that mean me?”

“Us, apparently. There’s no name.”

“Sounds like sarcasm, don’t it?”

She was shaking her head and her mouth was set in a rueful little pucker. “It beats me.”

I said, “He’s burned up.”

“I can’t see why. Can you?”

“Sounds as if something’s seriously wrong.”

She turned on me with surprising heat. “You’re crazy! Why, there’s nothing wrong. He’s just being funny — that’s his idea of a joke.”

She was embattled, and she had her reasons. She knew she had nothing to fear from me, but we had neighbors and they had eyes. Suppose one of these local infidels had an inkling of what was going on here between her and Orlando — seen them somehow from a dinghy? Or, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING signs and cutting through the yard — as they often did to go clamming — had a glimpse? If they had seen, and alerted Papa (it was possible: they were a contrary bunch) there would be hell to pay.

I said, “Maybe not seriously wrong — maybe just a little peculiar.”

“Peculiar?”

“Unusual,” I said, but I regretted that word.

“What do you know?” she said. “You act so high and mighty, but you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You go creeping around the house pretending you’re normal and barging in where you don’t belong — don’t think I haven’t noticed — but that doesn’t mean you can see. This is the thanks I get for reading to you and making sure your seams are straight — accusations and blame!”

“No one’s blaming you, Phoebe,” I said calmly.

“You’re a fine one to talk!” she said, “You’re the unusual one around here. You’re downright peculiar. Yes, Maude, I think there’s something strange with you upstairs — I’m sorry, but I really do.”

Something strange with me upstairs — look who’s talking! But I held my tongue.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said. “The fact is, the folks are on their way home. And something’s — well, something’s up. We’d better get the place shipshape.”

“The place is shipshape,” she said, still smarting. “If you weren’t blind you could see that.”

“It’s dusty,” I said. “It hasn’t been cleaned since Orlando went back to Harvard. Dishes in the sink, crumbs on the carpet. If Papa walked in now he’d have kittens.”

Phoebe, in a voice I did not recognize as hers, said, “I can’t face him.”

“Sure you can. We’ll get it spick-and-span in no time.”

But Phoebe had gotten up from her chair. She walked halfway across the parlor and stopped and looked through the window to the Sound. And I knew what she was thinking: If he knows, it’s the end, I’m done for. More than anything, she dreaded being found out. And I suppose she was afraid of what Orlando’s reaction would be — defiance. Her fear was also compounded by the memory of what she’d done, for in retrospect, and in Papa’s eyes, her sleeping with Orlando was a kind of insanity. What’s got into you? Papa would say; and she’d cry. Love was the explanation, but that was no explanation at all, since to the observer love looked selfish, a kind of stupor and lose of control. People saw in lovers what they saw in gluttons — a shameless and faintly absurd expression of appetite, a habit, an addiction that had no rational explanation. No matter how Phoebe tried to defend herself Papa would stoop and say, You what?

Off and on, for the next two days, Papa’s question seemed to occur to her. She brought it up like wind, a burp she suppressed with a wince.

I hoped she would fight for Orlando. But she fell silent; she was spiritless; she was drowning. And her descent — like people’s experience of my photographs, that surrender to memory — was a solitary plunge from the shoals of the present to the deeps where her love lay like a sunken ship, broken on the bottom, all its treasure fuzzed with tufts of sea moss, and rapid fish flashing through the wavering grasses and splayed barrel staves. But there was a difference between her and my fans: it was as if she wanted to stay there and not surface, to die a watery death in that dark and be among the split-open casks of her love until her white body was bones and turned to coral.